


All Through the Night

by josiepug



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon Era, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mental Health Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-28 08:42:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7633078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josiepug/pseuds/josiepug
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the death of Philip, the Hamilton household is quiet with grief, but the piano continues to play.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Through the Night

The strains of faint piano music drifted up through the floors of the Hamilton household, swirling through the air and making Alexander choke. He held his breath, laying stock still, trying desperately to will the scream back down his throat.

It worked, but the music was still playing, swelling until it clogged the night. Ever so slowly, Alexander turned his head to look at his wife. She was still sleeping, heavy with pregnancy, her eyes rimmed red and her face swollen. She was beautiful. It broke his heart.

Her eyelids began to flutter. “Shhhh,” Alexander ran a hand through her dark, silky hair, not certain whether he was trying to comfort her or drown out the music. She pressed into his hand, sighing with contentment that no longer graced her during the day. The music was getting louder, a high and sweet voice skirting the edges of his ears. Slowly, feeling exhaustion pull at every muscle, Alexander pushed himself out of bed and donned a robe. His feet dragged and he nearly ran into the doorjamb, but he was determined. Eliza needed to sleep, after everything.

He felt old as he descended the stairs, his body unwilling to obey his commands. Even his ears betrayed him, catching lyrics he did not wish to know.

_“Sleep my child and peace attend thee,_

_All through the night.”_

Angelica Hamilton’s voice met him clearly as he entered the parlour. For one traitorous moment, he allowed himself to stand there, eyes closed and imagining a different world. One in which Angelica was sitting at the piano with a smug smile on her face, mastering a song over which Philip’s fingers still fumbled. Looking to her father for recognition of her brilliance. She was so brilliant.

He rounded the corner.

“Angel, it’s time to go to sleep. I don’t want you to wake your mother up.”

“I know, but Philip’s being loud. He needs to go to bed first.” Her fingers did not stop their deft dance across the keys.

Alexander sat down on the piano bench. “What’s he doing?” he asked. He was reminded of times years ago when Angel would perch on his knee and tell him about her imaginary friends. Her little chubby hands — not graceful as they now were — would wave in the air as she talked endlessly about her mind’s creations. At the time, Alexander had felt exhausted, beaten down with fear for the future of his new nation.

Now, the plights of the whole world seemed small in comparison with his Angel’s frail frame.

_“I my loving vigil keeping,_

_All through the night.”_

Alexander recognised the song from a book of tunes that had long ago been lost amidst mountains of law papers. 

“How do you know this song?” he asked, because the sweetness of her voice was breaking him.

“Philip taught me.”

He shouldn’t have asked. He looked down at the keys, at his daughter’s beautiful, fragile fingers. He could snap them so easily if he wanted to. The thought made him sick.

“Philip’s dead,” he said, for the hundredth time. He no longer cared to blunt it. He knew it would make no difference. Besides, even his celebrated prose could do nothing to untwist the ugliness of reality.

As expected, Angelica was unmoved. Her fingers didn’t hesitate, repeating the refrain, and her voice retained a somewhat musical lilt. “He’s alive in the songs,” she said, and it might have been touching if she knew what she was saying, if she didn’t truly believe that he was still here, playing with her.

But she was no longer the intuitive, imaginative Angel he had raised, and Philip was alive in no way. He had died without reason, without even Alexander’s long-hoped for status of martyr. 

Just a boy. Just dead. No song.

He didn’t know what possessed him to put his hands to the keys. He had not played in a long time. Piano had been something he had learned as a young man, to woo women and their rich fathers. There had been a time when it meant romance and opportunity.

Now all he could think was how much the ivory keys looked like bone.

“See, Father, Philip’s playing with us.” Angelica was looking at Alexander’s hands, at his cracked, ink-stained, war-torn hands and smiling with a shadow of forgotten smugness.

He couldn’t speak.

He stared at his hands, fumbling a little on the notes, willing them to become Philip’s hands, ink-stained as well, but more slender and flexible. A poet’s hands. He imagined it with all his heart. He remembered a time when his mind allowed him to see a sparkling new nation overlaying the bloody fields of revolution. A time when his clever words could change everything.

Yet his hands remained old, and resolutely his own.

“What are you doing?” Despite Alexander’s best efforts, they had woken Eliza. She stood at the foot of the stairs, leaning her surely aching back against the bannister, watching them with a combination of grief and love that Alexander wished he didn’t know so well.

“Playing with Philip,” Angelica said with wistful confidence. 

Eliza and Alexander’s eyes met, the piano’s sudden silence creating a strange void in the air.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and he meant everything by it. He was apologising for the pain in his wife’s eyes, because surely no love was worth that. He was apologising for Philip and Angelica and the baby growing in her stomach who did not yet know how fragile its life was. He was apologising for not being able to protect her, not even from music in the night. “I’m sorry we woke you.”

Eliza understood all this and walked over to them, laying a hand on each of their shoulders. “Don’t be,” and it was the worst thing she could have said.

“We’re having guests from the practice over tomorrow. I would be grateful if you would prepare the sitting room,” he said because there was no longer a line in their lives between the normal and the middle of the night.

“Yes. Angel, you should sleep. You want to be rested to see your father’s guests,” Eliza said with firm gentleness.

But Angelica shook her head. “Not until Philip is asleep.”

“I’ll stay with her,” Alexander said because he could do nothing else.

“You should go to bed,” Eliza said, but her face was relieved.

_“Though I roam a minstrel lonely,_

_All through the night.”_

Angelica was singing once more. “I’ll stay with her,” he said, fingers picking up a harmony without his consent.

Eliza nodded, returning somewhat laboriously to the stairs. “Well, I’m going back to sleep.”

Alexander watched her climb up to their bedroom, wanting more than anything to run after her, catch her hand and hold on forever.

But he stayed downstairs, burning down the candle wax and playing piano for the dead.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry this is so sad. I swear I'm writing something happier but it's loooooong so this is what you get.


End file.
